Widespread rain will continue across the Midstate most of this evening, gradually shifting to the east after midnight. The HRRR model shows the wet pattern:
Temperatures will be nearly steady, only falling to the mid 50s by Friday morning:

Spotty showers will still be possible to start the day Friday, then we should be dry Friday afternoon and Friday night. We’ll warm up to the upper half of the 60s Friday afternoon:

A warm but unsettled weekend in store, with a decent chance of showers south of I-40 on Saturday, and rain expected areawide on Sunday. Despite the rain, temperatures will still reach the 60s for highs both Saturday and Sunday:

We’ll be in a cooler pattern Monday through Wednesday, but temperatures will still be above-average. After that? Check out the tail end of the “4-plus-4cast”:
The long-range models have been hinting at this for a while — a pattern flip-flop that would bring typical wintertime temperatures back into the Midstate. I even added a chance for a few mixed rain/snow showers next Friday, but that’s a looooooooong way off at this point. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is on the same page, at least in terms of temperatures — their 8-14 day outlook indicates a significant chance of below-average temperatures extending into early February:

LINKS

Most of today’s links have to do with yesterday’s confirmation that 2016 was globally the warmest on record.

This is a great graphic — a chart of Nashville’s day-by-day temperatures in 2016, including annotations of the multiple record high temperatures. (You can enter different cities at the top of that page to look at other locations worldwide.)

What experts think of speculation that El Niño will return in 2017. (El Niño was a factor in the global temperature records the past two years, but both 2015 and 2016 would have been records even without it.)

What I saw was 0.01 C by one report and 0.04 C by another, with an MoE of 0.1 C. Therefore, I don’t believe you can truthfully assert that it was definitely warmer. It might have been warmer or cooler, but the best thing you should say is that the temperature was about the same as being in the margin of error.